Romance Season: In the Mood for Love (Dir Wong Kar-wai, 1h 38m, 2000)

Wong Kar-wai is one of Hong Kong's cinema's great directors, from his debut with the crime film with As Tears Go By, to his slow movement away from the then-popular trend of crime and action that typified 1990s Hong Kong cinema, to far more personal stories, including Days of Being Wild (1990), Ashes of Time and Chunking Express (both 1994), and Happy Together that broke him through in the west. His triumphant return to Hong Kong cinema, in the beautifully-made In the Mood for Love, which, against the backdrop of 1960s Hong Kong, depicts the growing relationship between a young man (Chow, played by Tony Leung) and woman (Su, played by Maggie Cheung) with absent spouses having an off-screen affair, is undoubtedly his masterpiece, a film that encapsulates Wong's lush visual and quiet, slow-burning narrative style in the slow unspooling of their relationship.

Beginning in 1962, in a Shanghai-exile community in Hong Kong, we are introduced to Su as shes move into her apartment, with another couple, shortly revealled to be Chow, moving in on the same day. These opening moments-and indeed much of the film's interior sequences with a single member of this strange couple, is shot in an often claustrophobic manner. Wong rarely shoots straight on, and as a result, figures often appear in doorways or windows, framed but off to one side, giving things a sense of entrapment, and nowhere is this better seen than in shots of the kitchen, often with characters off to one side, or framed through the door, whilst Su stands outside. It's a brutally simple, wonderfully evocative way of showing the separation, the isolation that she feels throughout the opening sections of the film.

Certainly, Maggie Cheung lends Su a degree of pathos-this is a young woman in an otherwise older household, dominated by the landlord, Mrs Suen (Rebecca Pan), a warm and effusive, if overwhelming presence in the film, as she bustles around, gives advice, and, in short, embodies the older, more socially conservative Hong Kong of the 1960s. With her fashionable dress and appearance, even wearing highly fashionable dresses to go out to buy noodles, there is more than a little of the entrapped wife, plyed with goods by her unseen husband, but unable to confront the loneliness of having to eat alone. Add to this her clothing, which Cheung herself regarded as understanding her character's quiet strength, and we begin to get a sense of Su as a character. But what differs In the Mood for Love from many other great films of romance, is the very sense of it being unobtainable, forbidden.

Enter Wong. In Wong's own admission, Tony Leung's character is influenced by James Stewarts' character in Vertigo, but, given the sympathetic face of Leung, a similar slickness to Stewart, he undoubtedly becomes the closest the film has to a hero. Their first interactions are piecemeal, an occasional conversation, but, as the two begin to suspect their spouses may be having a relationship with each other-something the film never confirms not denies-so their conversations become longer, leading to the film's undeniable centrepoint, where the two share a meal, not in the claustrophobically shot apartment, but in the spacious and loosely shot restaurant where they essentially recreate what they believe their spouses infidelities to be. It's a remarkable sequence, all the more so for its sudden change in cinematic language.

Wong's depiction of love is as much a culnery concept as a romantic one; Chungking Express, in which two romantic plots intertwine, has food and meals play a key role. Thus, we see Su and Chow eat alone; their intersecting trips to the local noodle stall are shot in breathtaking slow motion, soundtracked by "Yujemi's Theme", from the 1991 Japanese film Yujemi, the rich colours of Su's dress, and Hong Kong itself in the 1960s on full display. As with Chungking Express, the social niceties of eating together, and the isolation of eating alone are shown perfectly. Their isolated meals, unquestionably, stand in for their lack of romance, their lack of intimacy with absent (both in terms of narratively and cinematically, as we never see either on screen) spouses.

From here, the film begins to gather pace; Chow and Su begin work on a martial arts serial, eventually move to a hotel, away from the eyes-and conservative condemnation of their friendship; there is a sense of Wong commenting, not only on the society of Hong Kong in the 1960s-his previous film Happy Together, depicting the relationship between two gay men, may be more openly going against the grain of Chinese and Hong Kong society, but In the Mood for Love hinges, in short, on the impossibilty of the love between Wong and Su. Much as Wong's previous film does, it focuses on longing and regret in this dreamlike piece of cinema, with the sudden separation of Wong and Su midway through the second act.

This action, whilst typical of Wong, sends the film in an unexpected direction that only heightens the loss, as this great moment of decisiveness, of wanting to leave Hong Kong for Singapore together, as their relationship goes from platonic to romantic, and the loss of this relationship clearly has an impact upon both of them. Su, a year later, goes in search of Chow in Singapore, but cannot bring herself to speak to him. It's a moment of separation, of grief, and it is only heightened by the scene echoed three years later as Chow returns to Hong Kong, narrowly missing Su, as she and her young son take up residence in the former home of Mrs Suen, perhaps unable to ever truly escape the conservative sensibility of the period. The film ends, in perhaps its most dreamlike moment, with Chow whispering the secret of his infidelities into a wall at Ankor Wat, a location that the film drifts through in its final moments

It is a film of longing, of missed chances, of impossible love, with the lush visuals, the dreamlike sensibility, that only Wong can bring to his films, a space at once liminal and absolutely human, of these social interactions, of these romances brought together more from the happenstance of everyday life and elevated into evocative, beautifully made cinema, in which even the most homely of gestures, even the sharing of meals can become the largest of romantic gestures. In the Mood for Love is a stunning slice of romantic cinema.

Rating: Must See